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It probably comes as no surprise that this blog post is prompted by a piece of 'journalism' in The Guardian by some bloke. I don't know the fella and I don't especially want to link to the piece directly because it's a piece of cynical clickbait that doesn't deserve the hits - but in the spirit of knowing what you're arguing against, it can be found here.

The substance of the article is that life is too short to read unworthy books, and that these books can be determined without having any knowledge of them whatsoever. And people who enjoy this lesser kind of work are lesser kinds of people. To sum up: Jane Austen good; Terry Pratchett bad. Yawn.

It was heartening to see my Twitter TL explode with rage at such nonsense. This tweet by Laura Lam sums up how I feel about reading:

Being a literary elitist is so boring. Read whatever you like. I read 'highbrow' literature. I read 'b…